


concerning the dangers of deserts and liminal spaces

by iimpavid, voidteatime



Series: Bites and Pieces [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Eldritch Abominations, Erotic Horror, Human/Monster Romance, Improbable anatomy, Magic, Major Vore Vibes, Multi, Original Mythology, Other, Polyamory, Science Fiction, Violence, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:47:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23804854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidteatime/pseuds/voidteatime
Summary: Just a little remix of the "how i learned to stop worrying and love the beast" universe, one with a few less fandom notes and a happier (maybe?) cadence. No part of this is really complete but I wanted to post the disjointed pieces I've got.
Relationships: Velvel/The Thief
Series: Bites and Pieces [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1552012
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	concerning the dangers of deserts and liminal spaces

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [how i learned to stop worrying and love the beast](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21428350) by [iimpavid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid), [voidteatime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidteatime/pseuds/voidteatime). 



> Just a little remix of the "how i learned to stop worrying and love the beast" universe, one with a few less fandom notes and a happier (maybe?) cadence. No part of this is really complete but I wanted to post the disjointed pieces I've got.

There were stories about an impassable temple in the desert. Stories that, upon inspection, made no sense because anything that occasionally admits the public is laughably insecure. So thought the thief, who was a fool first. He was cocksure and proud and deeply, irrevocably curious and the temple’s nature was to draw and trap the curious.

The fool seeks the temple to learn its nature and wanders his way into its sanctuary. There is gold and marble in the floors and walls and the impossible ceiling vault is supported by nothing at all. Fires crackle in braziers spaced enough to allow for the darkness to seem thick and teeming. There is not, as far as he can tell, another soul in the temple. 

He wanders the empty halls … touching things and marveling at the way the polished gold veined through everything breathes under his fingertips and seems, when he presses, to have a pulse. There is a distant sound, or his ears are playing tricks on him, but he’s certain suddenly that he cannot be caught. He pads barefoot and guileless beyond the welcoming firelight and into the heavy dark. The floor grows soft and the unfathomable, boiling ceiling inches lower and deeper. He considers it.

The ceiling considers him back.

His eyes flicker, unable to settle on any one facet of the unchanging dark above him that roils with something like consciousness. 

The fool stretches up to try to touch it-- against instinct and sense because he may be a fool but he is familiar with some creatures of this kind. Similar but very different: a carnivorous plant that had made itself into an entire planet and consumed the unwary who walked over Her in idleness or pride. It’s right to greet such vast gods, good luck to give them the courtesy of touch.

The illuminous matter is warm and slick.

His touch provokes an awareness. An eye reveals itself in the gloom, singular and silent and deep, deep red. No human ventures so deep in the temple, not without dire consequences and certainly not without bringing their own light. But the temple is empty without its Priest and the Seer is curious. The only human to ever walk so deep into Them is Their priest.

Their priest… and now also this fool. 

The fool is guileless in his singular desire to remain hidden. He knows that he’s wandered into the belly of a living thing and is accustomed to dark and hungry places. His step is gentle; he walks barefoot. A long and dangerous habit to keep track of what roots move in the dark— and risking treading on thorns that will give their hungry writhing a way in. But for all the leering the ceiling’s black water does he feels no danger. The floor is smooth and the temple is far warmer than the desert so the fool is content to wander its empty halls. 

He only notices the eye grown out of the air itself by the goosebumps its gaze raises across his shoulders. Being seen startles him into calculated stillness and he turns slowly, on his heel, until he finds the source of this heavy regard. 

The eye is a deep unbroken bauble of red wreathed in thin shadow that blinks over it like skin.

“Well, hello,” he coaxes, swallowing the bitter beginnings of fear, “Do you get many visitors? I seem to have lost the tour group.”

 _You are new... and you are trying to hide, aren’t you? You must be, to wander so far from starlight and from fire in my dark._ Another eye blinks open to the fool's other side. _I am Velvel. The Seer and the Temple you tread so lightly across._

The voice comes from inside him or outside him or both at once. He turns toward the other eye at a speed that belies nothing of the way his heart leaps in his chest. “I would expect such lovely red eyes to be sharp in their observations; does the Seer have a face to match them?”

 _A face?_ They hum and the whole temple vibrates a fraction, _Since you asked... You may have A Face…_ And from the gloom a shape resolves itself to match the floating eyes.

It is a human face. Almost. Velvel is wrong in the perfect symmetry of Their dozen red, sclera-less eyes and the delicate seams of gold that run from the corners of Their black lips to Their pointed ears. Their face hovers at human height, scrutinizing the fool.

“Oh my.” His eyes don’t want to settle on any one of Their features. He’s sure They aren’t changing but he’s sure They are. Politeness keeps him from reaching out to touch Them in the mistaken belief that his hands might somehow be more certain of what they perceive. “I should’ve expected nothing less than magnificence, forgive me.”

 _It is unwise to touch,_ They warn him gently, mouth unmoving. _Why are you here?_

Their words are dizzying. He takes a deep breath to cover his shudder. “I… would hate to be unwise.” His palms itch. “I wanted to see what was here. I expected ruins and maybe some hermitage— I’ve heard stories out of this place but, I hope you’ll forgive me, I didn’t believe any of them were true.”

Ominous clicks issue from the Seer’s shadows. _And now you know the Truth. It is both, I am both_ . _So why aren't you running, human?_

The passage breathes around him. He won’t be allowed to forget for even a moment that the temple is alive. 

“Who said I’m not running?” He flashes the face They were kind enough to give him a coy smile with a bit of the truth. “I’m just not running from you.”

 _Interesting..._ Then at once passage sighs, the floor sloping upward. The fool can go back the way he came or roll that way. _Come no further, little human. It's dangerous without fires to light your way_.

There’s nowhere to go but where the temple permits him. He steadies himself against the warm wall with one hand, talking over his fresh fear as he makes his way down the new grade. “Dangerous? If you insist. I’ve known plants more threatening— that isn’t a challenge,” he adds quickly.

Velvel thinks briefly of folding inwards on Themself and crushing the intruder into an infinitely dense point; the unchosen reality flickers through the eyes on Their given face as golden light. Instead They herd him back the way he came. Turns he’d taken straighten and doorways constrict shut as he passes. If he doesn’t move fast enough for Their liking the floor bulges and slopes under his heels to trip him forward. 

Instinct suggests to him that there’s something here They don’t want him to see. 

Of course, he eventually sees it: a gleaming gem floating on some magic deep within Them. It isn’t often that the fool passes up an opportunity to steal something. To the thief money is seldom important but the gem he spies above the pond of black must be incalculably valuable to be so well hidden amid dunes of off-white pebbles. He continues to speak to Them a little absently, slowing his steps just a bit. 

“How is it that someone such as yourself is stuck with guard duty? I think you should have attendants, at least. Or are your worshippers so careless? You deserve better.” Then he holds his breath on superstitious impulse and steps, feather-light and rabbit-quick, over the threshold to the white pebbled beach just as it draws shut onto itself. 

* * *

_I attend to myself, I am not needful._ Velvel lies to protect Themself but the human is not there to hear Them. He has vanished from Their perception and They assume he is purged. 

* * *

The Seer has no awareness in this deep place. 

The pool of tar, unlike the fathomless and silent black of the ceiling, makes a soft burbling sound. The fool, who has resolved into a _thief_ , can see it ripple and sway in the faint light of the floating gem. The light from the floating gemstone is smaller now than it had seemed in the hallway. This place is colder than the desert outside the temple, too, its chill sinks straight to his bones, and the dunes feel wrong beneath his feet. There’s a sharpness to them that has him wincing in the pale glow — he hisses and tries to distribute his weight evenly. The sharpness becomes a puncture on the next step and he balances, a curse bitten behind his tongue, to pull the pebble free. 

His fingers tell him the truth: a long and slender tooth is stuck into his foot and he feels blood trickle from his arch to drip onto the rest of the teeth he stands upon.

A vicious and prideful piece of the thief thinks this god should, perhaps, consider the benefit attendants to their temple might provide. 

He smothers the thought. Shivers in the cold. Focuses on the only thing he can see: the light above the pool. He bends to retrieve a tooth and tosses it onto the pool’s surface. It doesn’t skip or plunge into the depths. It sits on the crest of a bubble for a few seconds before breaking and being consumed. 

The walk to the pool’s edge makes him bleed a little more but it lets him gauge two very important things: first that the gemstone sits low over the water, no more than his arm’s length above it and second, that the pool is draining. There is no source that he can see for the flow of ichor but it is all going out somewhere. 

He reaches out and touches the back of his hand to the tar. It clings to his skin like paint but it doesn’t try to suck him in. He watches the back of his hand, counting the seconds. Sits there on a prickly dune of teeth from humans and animals of all kinds and waits. After maybe a quarter of an hour the skin feels warm, then hot, it burns and he wipes the fluid. off on his clothes as best he can. It sloughs off and leaves behind a sore place that he doesn’t doubt will be raw and red in good lighting.

The thief is a fool but he isn’t stupid. He backtracks and bleeds a little more over the amassed dead teeth. Walks the perimeter of the chamber he’s found himself in, feeling — gently at first and then harder and then knocking to find hollow places— for a potential exit or handholds with which to climb. He finds nothing. Nothing but the calmly bubbling fluid behind him. 

“I don’t suppose you can hear me? I’ve clearly made a mistake,” he calls because regret gnaws at him. 

He’s met with silence in his own mind. 

He tries shouting but to no avail. 

He waits for hours and falls asleep in the cold and wakes up in the cold with only new bruises and teeth stuck into his skin to show for it. 

His own hubris has trapped him. 

He turns back to the pool. The place on the back of his hand aches but it isn’t worse than a sunburn after fifteen minutes for bare skin exposure. Maybe five more before damage becomes serious. He can hold his breath for ten minutes under ideal conditions. 

The water of the pool is flowing toward something. There’s an outlet in it to somewhere.

It’s swim or starve among the discarded teeth of the dead and digested.

“That’s not any choice at all,” he murmurs to himself to convince himself it's true. 

There is no wading into the viscous fluid; the drops into it like a stone and emerges from its thick grasp gasping. The warmth is a relief that tempts him to stillness and drowning.

He swims for the slow whirlpool but pauses to retrieve the stone where it floats above him. Its edges slice into his grasping palm. There will be no pocketing it to hide it— it glows through everything but his bones and it would shred the fabric besides. He holds it as carefully as he can without losing it and dives for the slow center of the whirlpool at the pond’s far edge.

It’s not nearly as deep as it looks, he thinks as he propels himself along with the current, maybe a dozen feet down. The stone cuts into his hand but casts ample light. There is a chance that this is how he dies; alone and dissolved in the innards of some unknowable beast but he refuses to entertain it. 

The thief pulls himself through a narrow stone passage that grows less murky and more clear and cool as he goes on. As his lungs burn he feels something like hope. 

* * *

He bursts forth from a burbling stream with dark, searing fluid clinging to him like tissue. The bank he washes up on have teeth mixed in with the pebbles and red silt. The forest, with its pale-leaved trees that rustle with a lazy wind of awareness, is impassive in the face of the drama that is his gasping and heaving free from the water with the glowing stone clasped between his raw hands. It glows faintly and drinks the blood it cuts out of him. 

Lying on the fern-dappled riverbank he has a brief moment to consider the stone sitting in the ruined meat of his palm before the pain overtakes him. Every inch of his skin that was touched by the ichor in the temple deep burns.

The ferns with their soft and transparent fronds serve his purpose well and he only loses a little skin with the black fluid he wipes free from where it’s found his skin. He’s vainly glad none of the bleeding and raw places are on his face or his scalp.

The shore chews at him but the digestive tar had given him a fantastic distraction. With so much of his skin a raw ache he discovers walking is not as painful as he’d feared. 

He’s nearly silent in his seeking a trail out of the forest. Through a copse of the birch-white trees, he spies a figure traveling inward and crouches low to hide from him where the trees are thickest. 

The traveller carries a golden lantern filled with brilliant orange fires like those surrounding the temple’s altar. He walks slowly with his hand clasped over his right eye and he calls a Name into the dark — before he and his light vanish with a loving sigh from the Temple. 

Or, the thief thinks, he has vanished _into_ it. The sound that greeted him was inhuman but it’s fondness rippled through everything. 

The thief presses on. The soil grows tougher as he nears the outskirts of the forest’s warmth. It is a portent of things to come. The desert beyond this place will be cruel unless he has the good luck to stumble into some wandering caravan. But he’s hopeful. The stone he’s stolen is unlike anything he’s ever seen before. It is worth at least a King’s ransom. Surely more than enough to secure the hide of a lowly thief.

* * *

Not three days pass before the thief, the _fool_ , learns a new depth to terror: no one will buy it. 

The stone is a wicked thing but it is beautiful and clearer than starlight but no one will buy it. 

It makes a ruin of his palms, leaving deep scars in their centers like eyes that open and bleed no matter how he tried to carry it. It could be a useful weapon, he thinks, or in the right setting it would beguile any collector. Its structure, when examined, defies classification. It is new to science, new to art, and invaluable. 

But no one will buy it. 

* * *

The fool doesn’t mean to do it.

He  _ means _ to bring it back to the temple he stole it from. To find that deep place again and replace the stone in the same liminal pool he found it floating over, or at least on its shore, and make his way out into the desert again satisfied with his own failure and a simple lesson: _ some things should be left alone _ . (Some things are too good to be true. There is no one treasure that will ransom him. He is not that lucky.) But before he can go more than a hundred yards into the trees he comes upon a man in the temple’s surrounding forest who tries to take it from him. A man who is faster, stronger, and possessed of a Knowing red eye where there once was an empty socket. The eye follows the thief’s every movement before he makes it.

The thief, being foolish, knows certain things about himself. He knows his skills. He knows a fair amount about tactics. He knows these things so well that he seldom thinks before employing them.

He raises one bloody hand to his mouth and swallows the stone. He has swallowed precious things before, has taught himself how to vomit them back up delicately, even politely, without so much as making a sound. This should, his panicked body reasons without consulting his mind, be exactly the same.

There is a moment of complete and perfect stillness in which the man, a Priest of the Seer returned after a long voyage, stares down at him. He releases the thief’s collar. 

The thief, the fool, doesn’t get to relish his triumph, to clamber to his feet and take off running as he so wants to. The stone glows behind his teeth. A guttural sound of shock rises out of his mouth and his eyes widen. The very back of the thief’s tongue is the first thing laid open as his throat closes around it and it is not the last.

* * *

Through Their eye in Their priest Velvel understands what has happened but can’t accept it: Their heartstone is precious to Them, young and unfinished as it is, and this thief stole it from Them. And now, on top of that injury, he has _ tried to eat it _ . Most thieves, in Velvel’s experience, don’t consider stolen goods to be so precious.

They manifest into a body to watch it unfold, centering Their awareness on Their forested outskirts, lithe-limbed and transparent and robed in diaphanous red.

The thief tries to pick himself up to arrange his body into a better angle for vomiting -- and sobs when he can only bring up blood and bile that sears the fresh wounds in his throat and mouth. 

The thief kneels at Their feet, bone-pale soil streaked to a bloody mud across half his forehead where presses it into the ground between bouts of heaving. He’s clawed the front of his throat raw and his hands are dug hard into the skin above his sternum. The stone gleams bright, outlining the slats of his ribs and the delicate bones of his fingers. His mouth gapes, fish-wide and gasping breaths.

Velvel cocks Their head, Their mane rippling through the fabric of space with the movement.  _ Poor thief… does it hurt, thief? Have you learned your lesson, thief? _

The Seer speaks down to him or into him. He can’t tell the difference, can’t think to locate where he feels Their voice, and he draws breath— to beg, maybe, or to meet Their condescension with some snappish remark to make himself feel less terror— then gurgles around a shout and convulses. 

He’s trying, desperately, to force the stone back out of his esophagus like so much illegal contraband and the stone is trying, desperately, to force its way down and through him. Neither of them will relent and the stone is stuck, tearing delicate, vital tissue deeper.

_ What a painful way to die _ , The Seer observes, pulling the clammy rictus of the thief’s hand free from the hem of Their robe. His fear is radiant with overtones of petulant anger. Contrition lies thick beneath all of it. He could sustain Them for a century.

To Their priest, and to Their priest only, Velvel instructs,  _ Go to my Sanctuary, you will not like this. _ And Their priest, knowing from experience that They are always honest, accepts the gift of being spared the violence to come.

_ Be still _ , They speak into the thief and his body. 

Without his meaning it to, his body obeys. 

They cup his jaw with Their many-jointed fingers and wrap another hand around his throat, not squeezing or pressing, only touching. Their touch is cool. Reflexes in him tremble against Their command and blood streams from his lips, over his chin and onto the backs of Their hands.

_ You will not die like this, _ Velvel tells the reality of the thief. More a fool than a thief, They decide. If he had an ounce of sense he would have known not to steal a heartstone, let alone swallow one. 

He’s chosen to enact his human stupidity on the outskirts of Them so the work is slow. By small measures, reality conforms to Their will. The heartstone dulls. Wounds in the thief’s throat knit. 

_ You will not hurt yourself any more, little fool _ . 

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, I wouldn't mind one bit if you commented on my nonsense.


End file.
